A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Chris Bowman.
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No Mainer would assume that David Byrne — legendary frontman
for the Talking Heads and endlessly inventive musician and
artist — would be fascinated by the Penobscot River Restoration
Project. … This Saturday he’ll be giving a talk and leading a
panel discussion at the Waterville Opera House with local
experts about the dam removal project in the lower Penobscot.
… The project began in 1999 as a collaborative effort
between many Maine organizations and businesses to better
balance hydropower needs with restoring native fisheries and
getting the river closer to its natural, pre-industrial state.
Between 2012 and 2016, the Veazie Dam and Great Works Dam in
Old Town were removed, and a bypass was constructed on the
Howland Dam.
Flooding could affect one out of every 50 residents in 24
coastal cities in the United States by the year 2050, a study
led by Virginia Tech researchers suggests. The study, published
this month in Nature, shows how the combination of land
subsidence—in this case, the sinking of shoreline terrain—and
rising sea levels can lead to the flooding of coastal areas
sooner than previously anticipated by research that had focused
primarily on sea level rise scenarios. … The study
combines measurements of land subsidence obtained from
satellites with sea level rise projections and tide charts,
offering a more holistic projection of potential flooding risks
in 32 cities located along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf
coasts.
The frustration for farmers continues to grow after recent news
of recent water allocation numbers. The Bureau of Reclamation
has announced a 35 percent federal allocation for Central
Valley Project recipients, as the California Department of
Water Resources has allocated 30 percent of State Water Project
requests. The news comes as the snowpack in the Sierra
Nevada sits at or near normal. … Joe Del Bosque of Del
Bosque Farms … says he and other farmers were extremely
disappointed with the recent numbers. He tells me with the
current snowpack, and recent, and potentially incoming storms,
the allocation should have been higher.
For the first time in four years, water is being pumped from
Tulelake to the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. The
historic Pumping Plant D in Tulelake Irrigation District (TID)
was constructed at the base of Sheepy Ridge in 1942. TID
Manager Brad Kirby said the five massive pumps ran year-round
for nearly 70 years. … In 2020, drought conditions and
federal regulations rendered the plant inoperative. As of
Monday morning, the D-Plant is up and running again, pumping
water from the Tulelake National Wildlife Refuge through Sheepy
Ridge to the Lower Klamath refuge thanks to the efforts of TID,
Ducks Unlimited and U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
Gov. Jared Polis and Dan Gibbs, Executive Director,
Colorado Department of Natural Resources announced Jason
Ullmann as the next Colorado State Engineer and Director of the
Division of Water Resources (DWR). … Jason brings over 20
years of experience in water resources engineering, 14 years of
which have been at DWR, most recently as the Deputy State
Engineer. Before his time with DWR, he gained valuable
experience in water resources management as a City Engineer for
the City of Montrose and as a consulting engineer for various
ditch and reservoir companies throughout Colorado.
Karrigan Börk, UC Davis professor of law and Associate Director
at the Center for Watershed Sciences, has been awarded the
prestigious $10,000 Morrison Prize for his paper on water
rights. The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State
University recognizes Börk’s paper as “the most impactful
sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North
America” for 2023. Börk’s winning paper, “Water Exaction
Rights,” published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review,
proposes a solution to address current and future water crises
in the US: an exactions framework.
Last year, Pacific Gas & Electric announced that it would
demolish the [Eel River's] Scott and Cape Horn dams and
decommission the entire Potter Valley power project.
… Removing the dams will help restore natural river
flows, which will improve fish habitat along the Eel River.
That’s been a longtime objective of the Round Valley Indian
Tribes. The tribes have strong historic and cultural ties to
the river and its bounty. When the dams come down, the Eel
River will become the longest free-flowing river in California
according to fish advocates. Salmon, steelhead and trout all
will benefit. Lake Pillsbury will disappear. Demolition is not
restoration, though, and there will be ripple effects on other
nearby natural areas.
To address the concern of historic groundwater overdraft in the
San Joaquin Valley, the California Water Institute at Fresno
State, with assistance from students and faculty, conducted a
feasibility study to explore the potential for groundwater
recharge within disadvantaged communities. … The analysis
identified four potential locations for the design and
construction of recharge basins near or in the cities of
Kerman, Raisin City, Caruthers and Laton.
Two Tahoe towns are saying no to plastic water
bottles. South Lake Tahoe’s ban on single-use
plastic water bottles and paper cartons is slated to go into
full effect next month, soon after neighboring Truckee
passed an ordinance to implement a similar
ban. … The League to Save Lake Tahoe found that
single-use plastic bottles are one of the top five types of
litter in the Tahoe Basin, Truckee’s news release
states.
Fishers are fighting tire companies’ attempt to dismiss an
Endangered Species Act suit over the use of a rubber additive
known as 6PPD, which harms salmon, telling a California federal
judge the companies are trying to delay accountability…
Spring is here, but the rainy season is clearly not
over in California. Two separate storms are poised to impact
the Golden State this week. The first one is predicted to
impact only Northern California on Wednesday, bringing light
rain. The second one is expected to sweep the
entire state over the weekend, likely delivering a shot of
moderate rain to Northern California and a more substantial
heavy soaking to Southern California. The National Weather
Service’s Los Angeles office is starting to sound the alarm
bells and called the system a “late season
significant storm” in its forecast.
The Mid-Kings River Groundwater Sustainability Agency is
looking to impose a pumping fee of nearly $100 per
acre-foot. Mid-Kings River GSA is comprised of the Kings
County Water District, the City of Hanford and Kings
County. The big picture: The GSA is proposing a
pumping fee maximum of $95 per acre-foot. This comes after
the State views that the region has not made enough progress
through the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA). The state wants agriculture and industrial water
pumpers to cut back or pay to mitigate the impacts on
other users. The state could move to put the subbasin in
probation if it does not feel confident in local groundwater
management, and could completely take over operations in 2025.
… Lake Powell’s levels have fallen throughout the winter, but
as the weather warms, the snowpack that has accumulated in the
mountains over the winter will begin to melt. That water will
feed rivers and streams across the West — including the
Colorado River, which fills Lake Powell on Arizona and Utah’s
shared border. … The National Weather Service Colorado
Basin River Forecast Center predicts that 5.4 million acre-feet
of unregulated runoff will spill into the reservoir between
April and July. … According to the Colorado Basin River
Forecast Center, spring runoff this year will be 85% of the
average runoff between 1991 and 2020.
California farmers could save massive amounts of water if they
planted less thirsty — but also less lucrative — crops such as
grains and hay instead of almonds and alfalfa, according to new
research by scientists who used remote sensing and artificial
intelligence. Such a seismic shift in the nation’s most
productive agricultural state could cut consumption by roughly
93%, researchers with UC Santa Barbara and the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory reported Monday. But Anna Boser, the
study’s lead author, acknowledged that replacing all of
California’s water-intensive crops with the least-intensive
ones is an unrealistic economic scenario. … In a
less-extreme scenario, Boser and her colleagues reported that
fallowing 5% of fields with the most water-intensive crops
could cut water consumption by more than 9%, according to
the study, published in the journal Nature Communications.
A vast burn scar unfolds in drone footage of a landscape seared
by massive wildfires north of Lake Tahoe. But amid the expanses
of torched trees and gray soil, an unburnt island of lush green
emerges. The patch of greenery was painstakingly engineered. A
creek had been dammed, creating ponds that slowed the flow of
water so the surrounding earth had more time to sop it up. A
weblike system of canals helped spread that moisture through
the floodplain. Trees that had been encroaching on the wetlands
were felled. But it wasn’t a team of firefighters or
conservationists who performed this work. It was a crew of
semiaquatic rodents whose wetland-building skills have seen
them gain popularity as a natural way to mitigate
wildfires. A movement is afoot to restore beavers to the
state’s waterways, many of which have suffered from their
absence.
Does the public sector need the private sector’s help to
address the freshwater crisis? That’s the controversial thesis
of Stanford law and environmental social sciences professor
Barton “Buzz” Thompson’s provocatively titled new book: Liquid
Asset: How Business and Government Can Partner to Solve the
Freshwater Crisis. (Buzz is also a member of the PPIC Water
Policy Center’s research network.) We sat down with him to hear
more. … The private sector is already involved in water in
many ways, some more controversial than others. … We
think of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) as a
public program, and it is. The legislature passed the law, and
public agencies are implementing it. But if you look carefully,
you’ll see private handprints all over SGMA’s success.
Water Audit California has voiced concerns about Napa County in
recent months, appealing two Planning Commission decisions and
calling new county plans for storing paper records a “black
hole.” The environmental advocacy group appealed a Dec. 20
county Planning Commission decision approving a Nova Business
Park project. But its bigger claim is that the county fails to
do adequate due diligence, something the county denies.
A Senate panel voted to shut the public out of the key business
of the state agency tasked with finding new water for Arizona.
HB 2014 authorizes the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority
to enter into agreements to facilitate the construction of a
project that would bring water from outside the state into
Arizona. It also empowers the agency to negotiate deals with
others to agree to purchase the water once it becomes
available. But what HB 2014 also would do is exempt all
communications and information gathered related to water
augmentation from all provisions of the state’s Public Records
Law. And the only time anyone could get information would be
“on the consent of the authority.”
A new research paper published recently in Annual Review of
Earth and Planetary Sciences, coordinated by scientists from
The University of New Mexico and collaborating institutions,
addresses the complex nature and societal importance of Grand
Canyon’s springs and groundwater. The paper,
“Hydrotectonics of Grand Canyon Groundwater,” recommends
sustainable groundwater management and uranium
mining threats that require better monitoring and
application of hydrotectonic concepts. The data suggest an
interconnectivity of the groundwater systems such that uranium
mining and other contaminants pose risks to people, aquifers,
and ecosystems. The conclusion based on multiple datasets is
that groundwater systems involve significant mixing.
